The reason pg_unescape_bytea() do not exactly reproduce the binary data created by pg_escape_bytea() is because the backslash \ and single quote ' are double escaped by the pg_escape_bytea() function. This will lead to image seems corrupted when retrieve from the bytea field. The proper way to escape&unescape a binary string into a PG bytea field as follow:
<?php
$escaped_data = str_replace(array("\\\\", "''"), array("\\", "'"), pg_escape_bytea($data));
/* and later unescape the escaped data from the bytea field with following to get the original binary data */
$original_data = pg_unescape_bytea($escaped_data));
?>
more details at: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-php/2007-02/msg00014.php